Oh brother
I realize now that no program for keeping a nervously watchful eye on the country of my birth can be regarded as complete without a Twitter account. I added mine (as @RAHarrington) in November and only became active on it on the ninth of May of this year. Better late than never, as they say. It has been a fruitful educational experience.
For example. Apart from learning that the president of the United States doesn’t actually have a job, I’ve also discovered that, of the two brothers, Donald Trump Junior is ”Dumber” to Eric Trump’s “Dumb.” Don’t get me wrong, they are both equally a couple of (what the English call) gormless twits. But, judging from Eric’s somewhat more dialed down tweets, one gets the sense that on some level Eric may actually know (or suspect) he’s stupid. Junior hasn’t a clue.
For instance, Junior used Twitter to announce his upcoming book, “Liberal Privilege, Joe Biden and the Democrat’s[sic] Defense of the Indefensible,” complete with a snapshot of part of the cover. In his inaugural tweet about the book, Junior left out the subtitle. But that didn’t stop me from poking public fun at him anyway by wondering aloud if he’d read it yet, or if he planned to tell us who was ghosting it. That’s another pleasure about Twitter, you can mock the president and his idiot sons in real time.
(If you’ve ever read “The Art of the Deal,” as I attempted to in the 80s, then you would be justified in wondering if Donald Trump ever read it, let alone had any involvement in its development. Whichever the case, it’s a crashing bore of a book. It’s one of only a handful of books I have never been able to finish. Another was “Mein Kampf.”)
I’ll bet I have a pretty good idea what Junior’s book is up to as well. It’s going to be a lot of high and mighty talk about how us liberals are all a bunch of virtue-signalling phoneys who think we’re “woke” when in fact we are nothing more than a bunch of liberal phoneys. And so on. Holden Caulfield for Dummies. It will be full of carefully crafted anecdotes data-mined to reflect only one side of the social issues.
Junior spends a lot of time on Twitter mocking the idea of being woke, mocking the Black Lives Matter movement, excoriating his bete noir antifa bogeyman, retweeting anecdotal, and often strategically edited videos to make his point. (Funny thing about the videos that Trump *pere* and Trump *fils* like to retweet: they are almost always short snippets, as if they’re afraid of the context.) Junior’s tweets are, as you might imagine if you have never read them, full of sound and fury.
To me, being “woke” means to be aware of social injustice, discrimination and to acknowledge differences and diversity. It means to care what happens to people outside my immediate family or race. It takes a Republican to find something wrong with that.
The Black Lives Matter movement is a largely peaceful movement intended to draw attention to police murders of people of color. I don’t know about you but I’m glad I don’t have a job where I have to gaslight the American people over that one, by carrying water for a racist president who hates such protests. The last big Antifa rally was called D-Day. It happened in June of 1944. It was a rip-roaring success. And so on.
As I say, Junior hates the idea of being “woke.” He supports the idea that the Black Lives Matter movement is hate speech. He thinks Antifa is unamerican. And now he’s hired someone to write a book about it, and about how all those wonderful causes somehow track back to a thing he calls “liberal privilege.”
Well, I, for one, love those causes and am privileged to be a liberal. But in the end, like my brother and sister fellow-travellers, I am more interested in discerning right from wrong than right from left. As to Junior’s book, I can’t wait not to read it. I have no time for hateful propaganda. I suspect it’s going to sell briskly to a tiny but persistent handful of fanatical morons. Mary L. Trump’s book is going to do much, much better. And rightly so. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.